Related papers: Characterizing hydrogel behavior under compression…

We use dedicated microfluidic devices to expose soft hydrogel particles to a rapid change in the externally applied osmotic pressure and observe a non-monotonic response: After an initial rapid compression the particle slowly reswells to…

Osmotic pressure is the driving force for the swelling of hydrogels. The hydrogel osmotic pressure can be decomposed into two parts: the mixing part due to polymer-solvent interaction and the elastic part due to polymer chain stretching.…

From pasta to biological tissues to contact lenses, gel and gel-like materials inherently soften as they swell with water. In dry, low-relative-humidity environments, these materials stiffen as they de-swell with water. Here, we use…

Thermo-responsive hydrogels are a promising material for creating controllable actuators for use in micro-scale devices, since they expand and contract significantly (absorbing or expelling fluid) in response to relatively small temperature…

Microgels are soft colloidal particles that, when dispersed in a solvent, swell and deswell in response to changes in environmental conditions, such as temperature, concentration, and $p$H. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we model bulk…

Water evaporation is critically important for hydrogels in open-air applications, but theoretically modeling is difficult due to the complicated intermolecular interactions and sustained deformation. In this work, we construct a simplified…

Hydrogels hold promise in agriculture as reservoirs of water in dry soil, potentially alleviating the burden of irrigation. However, confinement in soil can markedly reduce the ability of hydrogels to absorb water and swell, limiting their…

Hydrogels have had a profound impact in the fields of tissue engineering, drug delivery, and materials science as a whole. Due to the network architecture of these materials, imbibement with water often results in uniform swelling and…

Folded protein hydrogels are prime candidates as tuneable biomaterials but it is unclear to what extent their mechanical properties have mesoscopic, as opposed to molecular origins. To address this, we probe hydrogels of the muscle-derived…

Thermo-responsive hydrogels are smart materials that rapidly switch between hydrophilic (swollen) and hydrophobic (shrunken) states when heated past a threshold temperature, resulting in order-of-magnitude changes in gel volume. Modelling…

Most thermodynamic modeling of hydrogels focused on predicting their final volumes in equilibrium with water, built on Flory's theories for the entropy of mixing and rubber elasticity, and Donnan's equilibrium conditions if polyelectrolyte…

Hydrogels have the ability to undergo large deformations and yet fail like brittle materials. The development of biocompatible hydrogels with high strength and toughness is an ongoing challenge in many applications. We crosslinked bovine…

We recast the problem of hydrogel swelling under physical constraints as an energy optimization problem. We apply this approach to compute equilibrium shapes of hydrogel spheres confined within a jammed matrix of rigid beads, and interpret…

Physically assembled gels have promising applications in many fields because of their tunable mechanical properties. Here, we report the mechanical properties as a function of polymer volume fraction ($\phi$) for a physical gel system…

Ionic microcapsules are hollow shells of hydrogel, typically 10-1000 nm in radius, composed of cross-linked polymer networks that become charged and swollen in a good solvent. The ability of microcapsules to swell/deswell in response to…

It is established that the mechanical properties of hydrogels control the fate of (stem) cells. However, despite its importance, a one-to-one correspondence between gels' stiffness and cell behaviour is still missing from literature. In…

Temperature-sensitive hydrogels based on polymers such as poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) undergo a volume phase transition in response to changes in temperature. During this transition, distinct changes in both thermal and mechanical…

Being able to precisely characterize the mechanical properties of soft microparticles is essential for numerous situations from the understanding of the flow of biological fluids to the development of soft micro-robots. Here we present a…

In recent years, ionic microgels have garnered much attention due to their unique properties, especially their stimulus-sensitive swelling behavior. The tunable response of these soft, permeable, compressible, charged colloidal particles is…

Precisely measuring pressure in microfluidic flows is essential for flow control, fluid characterization, and monitoring, but faces specific challenges such as \RE{achieving} sufficient resolution, non-invasiveness, or ease of use. Here, we…